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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

5G is the new space race and sooner than later we're going to have a Sputnik moment. Everything coming out of China needs to be taken with a grain of salt but it definitely seems likely that they will have a head start in 5G deployments, especially as Europeans seem resistant to US demands to boycott Huawei.

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no, 5g is hype. seriously, unless you want to live in a dystopian society where everything is "connected" it's not really a big deal

We're getting closer and closer to that future regardless of what we want.

when 5g comes we will all:

- feel the internet on our phones is about the same speed as it is now

- pay the same amount each month on phone bill

- have same low coverage areas as we already do

- see a bigger number on the top row of the phone

I guarantee the incumbent network operators in the US will find some way to role us into $100/mo plans.

Or an MVNO like Fi.

It has the potential to put ISPs out of business, so I'm sure AT&T and Verizon will have some new phone bill/bundle package to attempt to steal business from Comcast.

I've never met a single person that actually wanted to stay with Comcast. So would it really be stealing? /s

Every previous "G" was a big deal in terms of opening up new applications and business opportunities by significantly improving latency, bandwidth, and power efficiency. Going from 4G to 5G will eventually have just as huge an impact as going from 3G to 4G did, although rolling out the technology worldwide will be a slow gradual process.

Will it though?

The frequencies are so easily blocked by anything that you need transmitters everywhere and receivers everywhere - literally 5G phones will have to have 3+ separate 5G antennaes in different locations to avoid the signal being outright blocked by your hand.

5G devices will practically need line of sight to a transmitter.

There is 5G and there is 5G mmWave. They are two separate parts of "5G". There are still advantages to sub 6GHz standard cell phone frequencies such as lower latency and higher throughput.

The disadvantages you mention only apply to 5G mmWave.

I doubt it. Based on home internet soultions, going from <1Mbps speed to 10 makes a difference, going to 100 not so much, and gigabit range is useful for bragging rights only. 95% of end users do not have such bandwidth needs.

You get diminishing returns even on exponential scaling.

Ofc some possibilities do open, like cloud backup, or even personal data servers, but they are laregly unexplored as of today.

I cant imagine what would 5G bring practical to the phone, bandwidth doesnt seem a killer. Latency is probably acceptable as well. Maybe im too limited.

The latency reduction will deliver a major improvement in user experience, even if throughput doesn't increase much.

LTE already has good latency. IIRC at about ~5ms on the last hop.

Think about how many of the most popular apps right now would be unusable on a 3g connection. Uploading/viewing an entire feed of images and videos on social media, streaming shows and twitch, online shopping feeds that need to load tons of product images, etc. The speed bump from 3g to 4g was what allowed these entire industries to flourish.

In terms of the improvements from 4g to 5g, going from 40mbps to 400mbps may not yield super noticeable improvements right now, but you know what will? 5g's other big feature, wired internet levels of low latency. That means things that require instant feedback like remote controlling delivery drones or surgeons performing remote surgeries by controlling a DaVinci robot in the middle of africa from their office in the US.

So no 5g is not hype, the focus is just too much on the speed and not enough on the possibilities opened by 5ms latency on devices connecting miles away from a tower.

The problem isn’t the technical standards: Right now in my living room I get around 10 Mbps download on 3G (HSPA) and around 20-30 Mbps on 4G (LTE). Latency between the two is almost the same: 1 to 2 ms difference. In some places 3G is still better due to better signal conditions.

I remember getting those speeds back in 2009, ten years ago, when the maximum speed I could get on cable was 3 Mbps.

Main difference, and I guess the real business growth motivator, are the data caps. Back then I had a data allowance in the low hundreds of megabytes which made streaming music and video an expensive endeavor, while the cheapest plans now start at a couple gigabytes.

Cable latencies in the last mile won’t help when your patient is half a world 250ms away due to the speed of light. But it might enable gaming and other real time uses, though.

In general, shared-usage spectrum(like what wifi uses) can adapt faster to new uses.

So one way to guess uses for 5G is to ask:

Is there anybody using those frequencies for low-latency wireless communications ? what is their use case ?

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